The Death of a Bureaucrat (1966) is a difficult-to-find film made by one of Cuba’s most famous Directors, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. It tells the story of a young man’s attempts to confront bureaucracy and red tape. When a well loved sculptor is accidentally killed by the machine he created to mass-produce busts of nineteenth-century revolutionary hero José Martí, his family decides he should be buried gripping his union work permit (Carnet card) as a symbol of his dedication to Castro’s cause. Unfortunately, when his wife goes to receive her pension, the paperwork cannot be completed without her dead husband’s work permit. Distraught, she enlists her nephew to exhume the body and so begins a maddening paper trail that ends in a hilarious climax exposing the insanity of bureaucracy. A mixture of slapstick comedy and paranoid nightmare. See FILMS

A 1970s ‘anarchist’ group calling itself “Nada” abducts US ambassador Richard Poindexter in a brothel in Paris and holds him hostage in a farm in the countryside. The French Interior Minister gives Goemond, the police chief assigned to the case, a blank cheque to eliminate the anarchists. In order to protect the interests of the State in an increasingly messy and embarrassing situation, Goemond is quickly made the scapegoat. Meanwhile the group members quarrel among themselves as to the ambassador’s fate, while the police purge suspects in an attempt to crush the Nada faction. With violence escalating on both sides, the State and the terrorists are obliged to use one another’s methods in an increasingly desperate and relentless conflict. To watch the full feature-length film go to the FILMS tab

Libertarian Cinema: when films made history (Delta Films —Verónica Vigil, José María Almela) explores the film productions of the anarcho-syndicalist SIE (CNT) and examines their exceptional legacy with Spanish film historians and cinematographers such as Juan Mariné Bruguera. See FILMS

Johnny Cool (1963), a rarely-seen noir gangster film (starring Henry Silva and Elizabeth Montgomery), is based on a thinly fictionalised account of the life of Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giulianoafter his betrayal and presumed death in an ambush in Castelvetrano (Sicily) in 1950. Like Giuliano, ‘Johnny Cool’, starts off as an idealistic freedom fighter corrupted through the patronage of organised crime figure John Colini (modelled on deported US gangster ‘Lucky Luciano’). Colini recruits Johnny Cool as a ‘messenger of death’ and sends him to the USA to take revenge on the former Mafia colleagues who betrayed him and carved up his empire. As with the real-life story of Salvatore Giuliano, given the nature of power and men’s inherent weaknesses, few, if any, have sufficient strength of character not to set themselves above all morality and – with their techniques of violent control – abuse their authority. Inevitably, like Giuliano — especially when collaborating with the landed aristocracy, right-wing politicians, criminals, mafiosi and neo-fascists — whatever idealism they originally may possess will be poisoned, their social and ethical conscience eroded and corrupted, and their perception of the real world manipulated out of all realistic shape. See also FILM — Salvatore Giuliano

Documentary (in Spanish) made in 1986 about how agricultural workers (men and women) of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT began to implement one of the most profound social revolutions of the 20th century, a society in which everyone was equal and there was no exploitation.

It all began in the spring of 1969, with the “anarchist” bombs of 25 April, but it really took off on 12 December with bombs exploding in a bank in Milan’s Piazza Fontana killing 17 people, and injuring 88. According to the police and the official media these were “anarchist” bombs, as were those that later exploded on trains and in public squares in Bologna, in Brescia, on trains in tunnels, and other Italian cities. From day one the anarchists stated that these were not anarchist bombs, they were “state massacres”, part of a strategy of tension intended to prevent the Italian Communist Party from participating in government. A Rivista Anarchica, an investigative journal founded in early 1971 to expose the truth about the strategy of tension, published a number of articles over the years on the subject, as did its sister journal Libertaria, some of which are republished here. With the Berlusconi government in serious trouble is it possible that a new ‘strategy of tension’ is under way?

THE RULES OF THE GAME takes place on the eve of World War II at an aristocratic house party at an opulent chateau on a country estate just outside of Paris where the overlapping ‘affaires d’amour’ of all social classes are observed with a keen eye. Jean Renoir looks to the eighteenth-century world of commedia dell’arte and Mozartian opera, seamlessly integrating farce with tragedy, using a classical form to offer his audience a profound and multifaceted parable on the disturbing realities that underlie the veneer of contemporary French society, and which are themselves symptomatic of the nascent decline of Old World Europe. The film was initially condemned for its satire on the French upper classes and was greeted with derision by a Parisian audience at its première. The upper class is depicted in this film as capricious and self-indulgent, with little regard for the consequences of their actions. It was banned by the French government. FILMS

Billy Budd is a young man impressed from a merchant ship in 1797 and made foretopman on the British Navy frigate Avenger during the French revolutionary wars with England. In a conversation with the Captain, Edward Fairfax Vere, the ship’s master-at-arms, Jon Claggart, accuses Budd of mutinous conspiracy. Skeptical of the accusations (given Budd’s easy-going and cheerful bearing), Captain Vere invites Claggart to make the accusations in Budd’s presence. Given the opportunity to rebut the accusations, Budd, who suffers from an inability to speak under duress, is unable to do so. Frustrated and angry, Budd strikes Claggart, killing him. Though believing Budd innocent of mutiny and free of any intent to kill Claggart, Vere quickly convenes a drumhead court to try Budd . .

ANARCHIST/LIBERTARIAN FILM ARCHIVE

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Anarchism

Anarchism swept us away completely, because it demanded everything of us and promised everything to us. There was no remote corner of life that it did not illumine ... or so it seemed to us ... shot though with contradictions, fragmented into varieties and sub-varieties, anarchism demanded, before anything else, harmony between deeds and words
- Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary